Living Your Brand and Colors – Can I please use Pink?

I’ve been on a mission lately to do website updates, get nice clean presentation templates, update my business cards, and be consistent on blogging (blogging is another topic!). As I work on my outbound facing content, the colors to use are a popular topic with my team. My corporate colors are predominately purple, pink, and green. I like the colors and they mean something to me. But my team is not a fan of the pink – can you believe it???

I decided to do a little research on branding best practices, particularly pitfalls to avoid. I want to understand why my team is so pink-adverse. I seriously don’t get it!

First, let’s be clear, branding is more than corporate colors. Branding is how you present yourself to the market, the feeling you want the customer to have when they encounter you, and your values. This is what I help my customers define so they can ‘live their brand’.

Second, I’m not a color and logo expert – I have people on my team who are. I define the ‘feeling’ customers should have when working with the company and someone else comes up with logos and colors.

Here I am, off to the web for my research. What I learned:

Color is vital to creating a positive image, plays a huge role in memory recall, and conveys a message like no other communication method.

Color should set you apart, work with your industry and image, and tie to your brand promise.

Not too bad, in my opinion. Now, how does this relate to my target market? Since my target market is highly technical, predominately men, and teams solving really tough problems, how do I think they will react to the colors?

When working in my target market, I like that I am female and I can talk to all these super smart people. I pride myself in the ability to “speak geek”. I love hearing all the details the technical teams share with me as they solve problems like mapping the human genome, curing cancer, or finding yet another galaxy. Maybe the colors pink and purple make them feel uncomfortable, but with those colors they will also remember me, the girl, who they talked with and that understood.

The conclusion: I will keep the colors. I will lessen the emphasis on pink (because my team is so adamant about it!), but I will continue to wear pink and be a girl. A really smart girl who speaks geek and can talk technical with the best of them!

About the author:Kim McMahon has done sales and marketing for more years than she cares to count. She writes frequently on marketing, life, the world and how they sometimes all come together.